


The World Is Your Oyster

by thundercrackfic



Series: Ineffably Soft [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Because Aziraphale is Too Much, Because an angel in love can overcome a self-loathing demon any day, Because free will lets you think anything and that's what Crowley is all about, Crowley Has All the Genders (Good Omens), Crowley does sex drugs and rock and roll with humans, Crowley is Bad at Feelings (Good Omens), Crowley's Bentley (Good Omens), Industrial grade softness, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Other, Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), Suicidal Thoughts, There's sex and drugs but it's very soft, and then, but not serious - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 09:35:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22967827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thundercrackfic/pseuds/thundercrackfic
Summary: Three weeks after an intensely emotional healing at the hands of his angel, Crowley finally wakes. It's all Tew Much. He has to exercise some wiles and some free will, and inspire and commit some sins, before he can return to Aziraphale.It’s not necessary to read this story to continue reading the series, if you’d rather not deal with the mature themes it contains.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Ineffably Soft [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1534874
Comments: 6
Kudos: 55





	The World Is Your Oyster

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing explicit in here, but rated Mature for elliptical references to sex, drugs, and thoughts (with no intent to follow up) of self-harm and suicidal behavior. It's not necessary to read this one in order to continue the story from the previous installment to the next one.

A week after Crowley fell asleep in a puddle of blankets on the couch, Aziraphale decided he should go ahead and open the bookstore again. Not that he was over-eager to chase away customers, but he missed the regular flow of souls passing through the shop, with all their different flavors of human emotions for him to experience.

He encouraged a couple of bookcases to crowd into the space separating the back room from the shop, so giving Crowley some privacy, and opened up.

Each day (except Tuesday) he shut the shop at 5:30 and stepped out to obtain some takeaway for dinner, spreading his custom and compliments around all of the delightful little eateries in Soho, a mix of long-established and newly-immigrated proprietors. He returned and ate at his desk, reading, while willing a little zephyr to blow the savory aromas toward the couch and its resident demon, hoping Crowley would stir. 

Day and night, Crowley hardly twitched. Once in a great while there was a languorous rearrangement of limbs underneath the tartan blanket, which somehow resulted in the blanket swaddling the demon ever more tightly.

While he missed conversation with the demon, Aziraphale felt blessed to be permitted to sit watch over Crowley’s slumber. Each night he opened a bottle of wine and settled down in the chair opposite the couch to sip and read; each day repeated the last.

It was in the middle of the night, twenty-two days into the nap, when Aziraphale sensed a demonic presence filtering back into his bookshop: Crowley returning to consciousness. It felt vaguely tingly, a little dance on his nerves that said “a demon is present!” But it had been millennia since Aziraphale had learned to distinguish Crowley’s particular vibration from any other demon’s, and he felt no alarm. Moving quietly, Aziraphale got up out of his chair to make Crowley a cup of coffee.

* * *

Crowley was usually slow to wake. He resented being pulled out of peaceful slumber into the dreadful discomforts of the corporeal world. Always fought it as long as he could, especially when he was warm and cozy. So it was disorienting to wake rather suddenly and find himself in an unfamiliar bed—no, on a couch—tightly cocooned in a blanket.

He wriggled a hand up to his face and tugged at the blanket to open a gap to see out. With the benefit of a little light, he could tell that the blanket was tartan. The bookshop, yes, that’s where he’d fallen asleep. How long ago? He checked the stars and Moon—Satan, it had been three weeks. He should feel stiff, but he actually felt...good.

Good?

He rubbed his eyes. It wasn’t a dream.

Crowley heard Aziraphale pottering in the kitchen, and it suddenly all came back to him, the events that had immediately preceded his slumber. He was mortified, remembering the feelings and the emotions and the _things_ that had come out of his _mouth_ and he could hear the angel’s footsteps approaching now, and he was Absolutely Not Ready to face all of that, so he turned into a snake.

The footsteps stopped. “Crowley?” Aziraphale asked, puzzled. In his snake form Crowley couldn’t actually hear it, but he felt the two syllables and the rising pitch at the end. Didn’t matter, it was too late anyway; Crowley had already slithered off the couch and hightailed it under a bookcase, traversing to a second and third bookcase, then dashed across an open section of floor behind the till counter and across more floor and out of the hastily miracled-open door and then he was staggering back into his human form and falling into the Bentley.

Aziraphale miraculously manifested right next to the Bentley’s driver’s-side door, still holding a French press and coffee cup that he had evidently been in the middle of pouring for Crowley. Crowley instantly felt even more mortified at the evidence that Aziraphale had been _watching_ him sleep and _noticing_ him wake and was _anticipating_ his needs, it was _too much_ —

“Crowley! What happened? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, angel!” Crowley said, utterly failing at nonchalance and dropping the keys from his pocket. Who needs keys? A demon doesn’t need keys. He growled at the car.

“But—”

“Thanks for the hospitality, gotta go, see you ‘round,” he babbled as the Bentley’s engine roared to life and its tires screeched. A moment later, the keys vanished from the ground by Aziraphale’s feet.

Aziraphale stood in the street for a few moments, hoping the car would turn around and come back, but it didn’t. He wondered if he should go after Crowley, but the demon hadn’t seemed to be suffering, just in urgent need of a quick departure. “Mind how you go,” Aziraphale said to the empty street, and returned to the shop.

A few minutes later, Aziraphale exited the shop again, carrying a steaming Thermos of freshly brewed coffee and a spare scone, aiming for a doorway he knew to be frequented by a member of the local homeless population. If the demon didn’t want the hot drink, somebody else should enjoy it. Aziraphale couldn’t heal the man’s psychosis no matter how he tried—somethings are beyond most angels’ skill—but he could and did miracle him and his clothes clean, and calmed his irritated skin, and left him with a blessing for future good fortune and healing.

* * *

Crowley’s mind raced and he tried to escape it, pushing the Bentley to its limits (what limits? The car performed how he wanted it to). The engine’s roar still wasn’t loud enough, and he pushed it even harder.

It was more than just his embarrassment overwhelming him. He didn’t know where all the feelings were coming from—terror, arousal, embarrassment, elation—but the combination was more than he could face, and running from it felt appropriate. 

He expected the roads to be empty, and they were. Confused humans found themselves driving their cars down unfamiliar roads and, in one case, puttering around a darkened Formula One track. Crowley motored up and up into some hills and then down their other sides, and the Sun was rising and lit up the sea before him with rosy fingers of light.

Crowley sped downhill into what seemed like a new world. Elation at flying across the land in his beloved car soon dominated his other feelings, and he laughed as the speedometer crept to a ludicrous speed that had not previously been marked on the dial. If the laugh sounded more maniacal than amused, well, he was a demon, after all, and moreover he was a demon freed of lifelong pain thanks to healing at the hands of a God-blessed angel, and what the actual fuck?

England’s geography indulged him for a while, but eventually it began to insist quite strongly that it was, in fact, an island, surrounded by ocean. Crowley permitted the road to end and he exited the car, swaggering to the edge of a cliff overlooking the golden dawn-lit sea.

It was very peaceful, the sea distantly susurrating at the base of the cliff. His human corporation swayed while he stood, still feeling the aftereffects of the high-speed ride. 

The offshore breeze whiffed at his back. It whispered temptation to him: keep going. Step off the edge, that’s all you need to do. Keep flying.

“Terrible idea. Wings don’t work. Need a headwind anyway,” Crowley said aloud. He appreciated the possibility, though, that he could exercise his free will to throw himself off the cliff, or not. Having choices was so much better than being dead.

He spent a few moments imagining the universe splitting into two timelines, one where he was still standing and one where he was plummeting downward. Then he realized that today he felt less like throwing himself off a cliff then he ever had, at least since he’d been a demon. Before the Beginning, God had thrown him off the universe’s biggest cliff. He’d never had solid ground under his feet since They’d cast him out. He possessed self-knowledge enough to know that he sometimes sought self-harm because then, at least, he was in control of his own pain.

God had thought it justice to let him keep on suffering. Aziraphale had made a different decision, gone against Them.

“Fuck off! Hah!” he shouted at the sky, raising two rude fingers. “I’m fucking _done_ with falling.” He picked up a few rocks and threw them off the cliff as hard as he could, because it felt good.

Fuck, he felt _good_. Still a demon, but Aziraphale had somehow managed to do what six thousand years on his own could not. He felt taller. Not so crawl-at-your-feet-ish. It was miraculous (hah) how uplifting it felt to experience _slightly_ less chronic pain. His wings still burned, his mouth still tasted like ashes and dust, but he felt like he was flying even while standing still.

He looked down at his hands. Let his hips sway. Felt a lightness of his limbs, and a lack of a tightness in his shoulders that he’d carried forever, hunched against the physical torments left over from his Fall. Felt a new energy and ease, secure against the walls Aziraphale had built to shelter him from the jagged hole that was at the center of his soul. Not healed, far from it, but treated. Bandaged. Maybe even _healing_ , in the present tense, in the act of further recovery.

It shouldn’t be possible. Didn’t matter. Aziraphale had healed him. He chuckled. (In fact, he giggled, but it was beneath Crowley’s dignity to admit that.)

 _What the fuck am I going to do with myself?_ He thought. _Well, not jump off a cliff or take a swim in the Channel, that’s for sure._ He turned around, looking toward the north, whence he’d come. The rising Sun was at his right, the Bentley and a smoggy stretch of sky marking London before him; to the left, down the coast, was the place that Aziraphale had taken him to see the stars.

Aziraphale. Even a demon who’d lost all his grace could sense the intensity of Aziraphale’s regard for him, always had done, ever since Eden. Aziraphale was an open book. His childish curiosity and magpie-like attraction to unusual objects on the Garden wall had matured to a sort of professional respect by the time of the Flood. By the time of Rome there was more warmth, solicitude, even caring. And now?

Thinking about Aziraphale was like trying to stare at the Sun. Crowley couldn’t look at it directly. His mind slid away, unable to accept that he could be permitted something so good. He was a Fallen creature, eating dust, corrupted and dirty, consuming and destroying with fire.

He couldn’t handle it all yet. Aziraphale he’d deal with later, when his feelings weren’t quite so...burny. When trying to think of something good didn’t make him panic and retreat into reflective self-loathing. He shoved those thoughts away and tried to steer his mind elsewhere.

Humans, now. The world hadn’t ended. Was, in fact, going on much as it had before. Human lives went on in all their squalor and splendor, all their creative ways of making beauty and filth. Somehow, he and the angel were still here, still friends, none the worse for wear, able to move among humans and marvel at their pettiness and endless inventiveness. Which reminded Crowley that he had a fast car and he knew how to use it, and this world offered a myriad of temptations and innumerable opportunities to tempt.

Crowley flipped the bird at the sky one more time, dove into the Bentley, revved the engine, and with a skid on the gravel and a shouted “Wahoo!” he pulled onto the road. Time to have some fun.

Even Crowley couldn’t remember all the places he went after that, but there was a shopping mall involved and he took mental notes on updating his appearance while stirring up sins around him. Shopping malls were good places for all of them: gluttony, lust, wrath, covetousness, pride, envy, sloth. It was chaos, but it was joyous chaos. He miracled money into people’s pockets, whispered suggestions that reduced inhibitions, and stole a ruby and diamond earring for his own ear while he didn’t discourage humans from taking their own five-fingered discounts. His shirt upgraded to a sheer thing with a screen-printed pattern that suggested pornographic entanglements of limbs but, when examined closely, dissolved into abstraction. He wore it over a tight-fitting black garment that could be a cropped men’s undershirt or could be a bralette; either way it’d invite staring by people trying to figure out his gender. He duplicated pants with a leather-like texture—some kind of plastic material, amazing that humans could turn the decayed matter of hundred-million-year-old conifers into leather fucking pants—which stretched improbably over his wiry limbs. Crowley couldn’t wait to see Aziraphale’s judgy expression at the ensemble. It made him laugh to imagine it.

The temptations and demonic shopping grounded him, but it wasn’t quite enough. A poster caught his eye—a concert, tonight, that promised to be loud and debauched. Exactly the thing.

Hours later, Crowley was grinding in a mass of sweaty, skinny, drugged humanity under strobe lights and lasers, their motions driven by a strident, throbbing beat, the air thick with the sweet smell of weed. His consciousness was already stretching to incorporate the bodies around him, and drinks and pharmaceuticals were being passed, and soon the beat thundered in his bones and his grin broke his cheeks and then he wasn’t in the club anymore, there was a bed and two (three?) other people of uncertain gender (it wasn’t important anyway, and Crowley ecstatically confused things further by switching out parts as the impulse struck) amid a fog of lust and a tangle of limbs. The humans in the bed were too high to know whose parts were whose and seemed inspired to further lust to encounter new parts to play with. Sex in a body unaccustomed to the lessening of pain felt like flying (again with the flying, there! He missed being able to fly, but he shoved that feeling immediately away as being too melancholy, and he let himself and his partners enjoy his serpentine flexibility instead, until he wore them all out).

As the humans’ lust thinned into sleep, Crowley willed away the effects of the drugs and drink. He was a little regretful that he wouldn’t be around to witness the next morning’s conversation about what the hell had happened, but he felt so fucking _good_ and he needed to keep moving.

Aziraphale probably wouldn’t approve. Well, maybe he would, the hedonist. Regardless, it had taken the edge off. Maybe Crowley was ready to face him again, soon.

First light was just breaking over the tops of London’s taller buildings as Crowley parked the Bentley in its usual (illegal) spot in Mayfair.

He felt sheepish about his panicked departure from the bookshop. He’d have to make it up to the angel. Sitting in his throne, he planned how to make Aziraphale happy.

**Author's Note:**

> It’s my headcanon that the relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale is asexual because they’re inhuman; they’re romantic and intimate but don’t interact in that way. However, both clearly enjoy earthly pleasures and I see no reason why the very human earthly pleasures that they enjoy wouldn’t include sex. And it’d more likely be casual sex than anything else because if you’re immortal, any sex is casual sex. Similarly, they both enjoy alcohol so much, surely they’ve tried every drug humans have ever come up with.


End file.
